More on LinuxToday

FreeBSD group officially ends support for 2.2-stable, talks about future of ports.

Well, the time has finally come. The 3.0 tree was branched to
3.1-stable (RELENG_3) and 4.0-current (HEAD) today.

As has been announced before, the support for the 2.2 branch by
the ports team has now officially ended. New ports will no longer
required to be tested on 2.2. Also, ELF has been the default format
for the 3.0 branch for some time, so now seems like a good time to
declare the end of a.out support too.

We will not yank 2.2/a.out support from existing ports, but will
not require 2.2 or a.out support be preserved across port updates
either. This means that the numbef of ports that can be compiled on
2.2 will slowly decrease over time. In a few months' time, I will
remove all 2.2/a.out support from bsd.port*.mk. That will finally
free us from all the kludges we had to put into the system and the
ports tree in order to make a smooth (relatively speaking -- don't
laugh) transition from 2.2/a.out to 3.0/ELF.

I will build the final snapshot of packages-2.2-stable tonight
and put it up on ftp.freebsd.org. It will be kept there for a few
months, but will not be updated except for the "upgrade kits". I
will do my best to keep the upgrade kits in sync, but as I no
longer have 2.2 machines around, I can't make any guarantees.
(Also, as I said above, the ports themselves will evolve away from
the 2.2 branch, and there will be more and more ports that can't be
built even with the upgrade kits. Please move to 3.1-stable soon.
:)

As for the new branches, new ports are required to build on both
3.1-stable and 4.0-current. For now, i386 packages will be built
for 3.1-stable only; I will start building packages for both
branches when it seems necessary (right now they are identical so
it's rather pointless to divide the resources). Since we now have
the 8-machine "package building cluster" running at full speed, we
should be able to build the packages with a much shorter turnaround
time. We will also start providing packages for the alpha platform,
although when exactly that will happen is still up in the air at
the moment.

Since I'm posting to -announce, I would also like to take this
opportunity to thank Walnut Creek CDROM for providing us with the
cluster to automate package building, and all the people involved
in the ports collection (especially those who are committing new
ports and fixing existing ones like madmen -- you know who you are
:) for all the great work you have done. It is a gross
understatement to merely state that we couldn't have reached this
point (2,044 ports!) without you.

Sincerely,
Satoshi (and the invincible ports team)

Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD Leader) adds a quick
correction:

Just by way of clarification, it's actually being referred to as
"3.0-stable" right now in all of our docs since 3.1 does not yet
exist. Just wanted to head off any potential confusion over this!
:)

Please enable Javascript in your browser, before you post the comment! Now Javascript is disabled.